The Pirate Bay Announces North Korea Relocation

Infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, has said this week that they will be moving home from Europe and setting up shop in North Korea.

Despite the fact that North Korea is known to have a very limited internet service, TPB said in a blog post that the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un had offered the bittorrent tracker the opportunity to relocate there.

North Korea is arguably one of the most isolated countries in the entire world and it is well known for the excessive levels of control the leadership has over its people – highly censoring the media, internet and issuing strict guidelines that must be followed, even down to the way people wear their hair!

Announcing the move in a blog post, The Pirate Bay said; “The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets…Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.”

The relocation is almost certainly a hoax however – a move orchestrated as a commentary on how the Western world is resolutely cracking down on file-sharing and piracy. In true TPB form, the hoax has been cleverly executed as to those using the service, the IP address seems to be located in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Internet experts however have speculated that this is actually just a method of IP spoofing, that makes it appear as though TPB IP is coming from North Korea, when in all likelihood it is hosted from somewhere inside Europe.

Commenting on the irony of their supposed move to North Korea, TPB blog post said; “We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high…And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.”

Just a few weeks ago, The Pirate Bay said that they were shifting their hosting from Sweden to less hostile climes of Norway and Spain. The Swedish Pirate Party had been providing them with the bandwidth to stay operational, however mounting legal pressure from anti-piracy group the Rights Alliance meant that the file-sharing site had to sever ties with the country.

Over the last year or so, TPB has made a number of moves to protect itself against police raids and any attempts authorities might make to attempt to shut it down. It switched from torrents to magnet links in February of 2012 and discarded its trackers. Then in October, they moved to several different cloud-hosting providers in various different locales around the world.

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